Following an approved model for "state of the field" reports, one
might investigate the history of American technology by reciting the
number of technologists whose biographies were unwritten, of industries that remained unstudied, of machines whose origins were still
shrouded in mystery, of captains of industry whose rise was yet unchronicled. The writer would then close with a plea for historians of
technology to assign their graduate students these topics, assuring his
readers that a complete understanding of the subject would soon
follow.

However useful this approach might be in certain fields, in the
history of American technology I think it would be both depressing
and superfluous -- depressing because we have barely scratched the
surface of any of these important areas and the lists would be very
long; and superfluous because our need is not for discrete research
ideas -- there is an abundance of those -- but for a way to organize our
thoughts and separate the more important from the less.

Can one therefore conclude anything from the discrete studies that
have already been published? Now that these studies have been made,
the articles and books written, what do we know with a relative degree
of certainty about the history of American technology? What do we
have reason to suspect? In light of our present knowledge, what seem
to be the most fruitful lines for further study? These lists, I find, are
a great deal shorter.

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